We are in the midst of a significant time in the surveying industry, with a growing number of tools becoming more accessible, opening up new kinds of projects and also leading to new standards from organizing bodies. Today, we look at a few stories from friends around the industry looking at some of these trends. We start with a look at a revision of the Land Administration Domain Model and the effects of these changes. Then, we have a story about the USDA reaching a milestone in processing lidar data, and how they manage so much of it. And finally, a few of the biggest companies in the industry run down the differences and similarities between the surveying and mapping industries.
Find the full articles below.
LADM: digitally transforming the land administration ecosystem
Anthony Beck, Lu Xu | GIM International
In this article, Beck and Xu look at revision of the Land Administration Domain Model, and how it has changed the scope of the ISO 19152 standard. They write in their intro to this article, “The focus is shifting from the architectural requirements of the agency, to the architectural requirements of the ecosystem. At the same time, the LADM is recognized as being pivotal to the next phase of digital transformation, where policymakers expect increased operational and process alignment between agencies in the ecosystem.” From there, they run through how the LADM can support the digital transformation of the land administration ecosystem.
USDA Exceeds Petabyte Milestone for Processing Lidar Data
Bret Burghdurf | Lidar Magazine
The United States Department of Agriculture, as part of their regular functions, captures massive amounts of lidar data. Obviously, this gives them key insights into land all across the country, but having that amount of data on hand will inevitably lead to challenges around processing this data. That is the subject of this article, where Burghdurf looks at how the agency is able to overcome these challenges with the help of GeoCue.
Surveying & mapping: Overlapping technologies and professions
Matteo Luccio | GPS World
Finally, Luccio tackles the changing industries of surveying and mapping. As he points out at the top of the article, surveying long had higher accuracy than mapping for the purposes of GIS. New advances in GNSS and other technologies have changed this dynamic, though, and the industries are now increasingly overlapping. To delve deeper into this issue, Luccio spoke to representatives from CHC Navigation, Hexagon, OxTS, and Trimble to discuss what still differs between these two spaces, and how these companies stay relevant in the sectors.
